A local SEO guide for dental practices: how the map pack works and what you can change

How the map pack works

Google's own explanation of local ranking names three factors¹:

• Relevance: how well a profile matches what someone searched for.
• Distance: how far the business is from the person searching, using their location where Google has it.
• Prominence: how well known the business is. Google says this includes how many websites link to the business and how many reviews it has.

Google adds that there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking¹.

Here is how those three map onto what a practice actually does:

Two things about the map pack surprise principals.

It's different for every searcher. Someone searching from your car park and someone three miles away see different results. A single rank check from one point tells you very little. Grid checks, which record rankings at many points around the practice, give the real picture.

The treatment matters. "Dentist" and "dental implants" are different searches with different competitors. A practice can be strong for one and absent for the other, because relevance is judged per search.

Measuring where you stand

Before changing anything, record a baseline. Three sources give a reliable picture.

Pick a short list of searches that matter commercially, such as "dentist", "dental implants" and "emergency dentist", and check them on the same grid each month. The pattern over several months tells you more than any single check. A practice that shows strongly near the door and fades a mile out is normal. One that is missing even near the door usually has a relevance or profile problem worth fixing first.

Your profile

Your Google Business Profile, formerly Google My Business, is the listing that appears in Maps and the map pack. For most practices, it's the main source of local calls. Setting it up properly is covered in depth on the Google Business Profile guide for UK practices. Here are the principles.

Name. Use your real-world practice name, exactly as on your signage and website. Google's guidelines say names must reflect the real-world name, and that unnecessary information in the name can lead to suspension³. "Smith Dental Care" is correct. "Smith Dental Care: Implants, Invisalign, Emergency Dentist [Town]" is a policy breach.

Address. It must be a real, staffed location. Google doesn't accept PO boxes, remote mailboxes or virtual offices³. For a dental practice this is rarely an issue, but it matters when someone suggests a "satellite" listing at an address where you don't treat patients.

Categories. The primary category is the single most important relevance choice on the profile. Google's advice is to use as few categories as possible to describe your core business, to choose categories that complete the sentence "This business is a...", and not to use categories solely as keywords³. Categories are chosen from Google's list; you can't create your own⁴. The dental-specific options available in the UK list, and how to choose between them, are on the profile page.

Services, hours, photos and posts. These keep the profile complete and current, which is what Google's own tips ask for¹. Complete doesn't mean stuffed: services should be ones you offer, described plainly.

Practitioners. Google allows individual practitioners, such as dentists, their own profiles in some circumstances, with rules on naming and duplicates. Whether that helps or harms the practice profile is covered in when individual dentist listings help or hurt.

Ownership. The practice should be the primary owner of its own profile. If you have lost access to it, or someone else claimed it, Google has a process to request ownership from the current owner⁵.

Keeping the profile and website in step

The profile and the website should tell the same story. When they disagree, patients notice before Google does.

• The website linked from the profile should be the page that best matches the profile: usually the home page, or a location page for a multi-site practice.
• Every service on the profile should have somewhere on the website that explains it. A profile listing implants that links to a site with no implant page is a dead end.
• Hours, phone number and address should be identical, including bank holiday changes.
• Tag the website link from the profile so visits from it show separately in analytics. That is how you tell profile traffic from ordinary search traffic.

The relevance Google looks for comes from both. A profile says what the practice is; the website shows it in detail.

Reviews

Reviews feed prominence directly: Google names how many reviews a business has as part of it, and lists earning more reviews and responding to them among its own tips¹. They are also what patients read before they call.

What works is dull and consistent: ask every patient, at a sensible moment, the same way. Google's own guidance is to share a review link or QR code, remind customers, and reply to reviews⁶. The details of when and how to ask, and how to reply without breaching patient confidentiality, are on getting more reviews within the rules.

What doesn't work, and puts the profile at risk:

Reviews are also covered by UK consumer law and advertising rules, which are set out separately on the reviews and testimonials rules page. The tactics page links to it before any advice is given.

Citations

A citation is any mention of your practice's name, address and phone number (together called NAP) on another website: a directory, a map service, a health listing, a local business site. Citations help confirm that your practice is real and where it says it is.

Google doesn't name citations in its ranking explanation. Under prominence it names links and reviews¹. Citations are my reading of what "how well known a business is" looks like in practice, not a factor Google has confirmed. In my experience the value of citations lies in consistency, not count: a hundred listings with three versions of your phone number do more harm than twenty that agree.

The listings I prioritise for a UK practice:

The process is simple and tedious:

1. Decide the exact NAP: the name as on the sign, one address format, one main phone number.
2. Find every existing listing, including old ones from previous addresses or owners.
3. Correct them, or request removal where the listing can't be corrected.
4. Keep call-tracking numbers off citations. The main number should appear everywhere. How to track calls without breaking this is covered on call tracking that keeps your listings intact.
5. Recheck twice a year, and after any move, rebrand or phone system change.

Location pages

A location page is a page on your website about the practice's relationship with a particular place: the town it's in, or a nearby area it genuinely serves. Done well, it tells patients from that area how to reach you and what matters to them. Done badly, it's a spam pattern.

Google's spam policies name "doorway abuse", and give as an example pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page¹⁰. They also list, as keyword stuffing, blocks of text listing the cities and regions a page is trying to rank for¹⁰. The classic dental version is twenty "Dentist in [Town]" pages with the same text and a different town name.

When a location page is worth building:

What goes on a good location page

A location page earns its place with information a patient from that area could not get from your home page.

If you can't fill most of those sections with something specific, the page isn't worth building yet.

A location page doesn't overcome distance in the map pack. It helps your website rank in ordinary results for searches that include the area name, and gives patients a reason to make the trip. Keep expectations there.

What you cannot change

Distance is one of the three factors Google names¹, and it's the one you can't touch.

What that means in practice:

• You will be strongest near the practice. For generic searches like "dentist", the map pack usually favours practices close to the searcher. A practice rarely shows in the pack for "dentist" across a whole city.
• High-value treatments travel further. Patients will travel further for implants or orthodontics than for a check-up, and fewer practices compete for those searches. Relevance and prominence for those treatments can extend your reach further than for general dentistry. How far depends on your area and competitors, and I would measure it rather than guess.
• The searcher's location isn't yours to set. Two patients typing the same words in different streets see different results.
• Competitors are part of the equation. A practice next door to a strong competitor has a harder job than one in a town with none.
• Some things are out of anyone's hands. Google changes how local results look and rank, often without notice.

Moving, or opening a second site

The only way to change distance is to change where you are. Practices do move, and some open a second site. Both have local consequences that are easy to get wrong.

• A move needs the profile's address dealt with through Google's own help for changed locations, not a second profile left open at the old address. Every citation needs the new address, and the website's contact page and structured data need updating the same day.
• A second site is a second real location. It gets its own profile at its own address, with its own hours and phone number, and its own page on the website. It starts without the first site's reviews and history.
• A satellite that isn't staffed isn't a location. A room used once a month, or an address where you don't see patients during stated hours, doesn't qualify for a profile under Google's guidelines³.

The practical answer to distance is to use the right channel for the right job. Where the map pack can't reach, ordinary organic search and paid search can. Your website can rank for treatment searches well beyond the map pack's radius, and Google Ads can reach any area you choose to pay for. Planning them together, so local, organic and paid are not competing for the same patient, is the point of having one person own the whole system.

A dental local SEO checklist, one line per area:

If you want this checked against your own profile and area, email me at [email protected] about your practice. The first look is free: I check your profile, reviews and local results from the outside and reply with what I find. The way an engagement runs is on how I work.